


Bedside Wakes

by wetdryvac



Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Bedside, M/M, Other, dream - Freeform, wake - Freeform, wakes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 16:45:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15755763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wetdryvac/pseuds/wetdryvac
Summary: Little worlds, all caught up.





	1. Happy Birthday

**Author's Note:**

> As it were a dream, for therein anything might happen.

I dreamed that in college I knew a fellow vaguely. Our only connection was the sharing of a birthday. Every year we'd say, "Happy birthday! Who are we fighting today? Try not to die!" This dream friend of mine, well, out of college we wandered our separate paths and some years they'd send me the message, and some they wouldn't.

After 1927, I stopped hearing from them, but we weren't close, so I just kept sending the message. The war, the other war - and that other war - they got in the way, but each year I got the message out, not really thinking on it much.

Who are we fighting today? Try not to die.  
Who are we fighting today? Try not to die.

Methods came and went, but I always stuck with the aetheric transference, since I wasn't sure where they were. I knew they'd lost their sender in the teens - that was a bad war indeed, all mud and weeping - but still, a letter or a telegram sometimes made it through, and since I still had my guarantee in writing from Spibbit and Sons on the little silvered box, I just kept sending.

Who are we fighting today? Happy birthday. Try not to die.

2251, I dropped a character from the message accidentally.

Who are we fighting today? Try ot to die.

That evening in the January chill, a sparrow flew through my window, ignoring the glass entirely, a scarlet silken cord holding the container to its gold leg. Inside, the message read, "I don't know Try, please send more details."

I admit, the wars were tiring, and I barely less than three sheets to the wind when I replied. "The great Try," I sketched into the aetheromitter, "The one charge starting the war. Aren't they? Is everything OK?" And confused, heavy with laudanum and spice, I slept.

In the morning, silence. No barges in the sky, no grinding from the munitions plants by the sea. Nothing. And then the voices raised, one in the street at first - and then the thousand. And then the march began, loud and high in cheer, hard for the aching head, but compelling even I out into the street.

There, a sparrow landed on my shoulder, smelling faintly of smoke. It spoke, "We are not fighting today. Will you join me for living?"

His name was John Arventier, and he died in 1927, disposing of some unpublished word. In 2251, sparrow on shoulder, when I joined him for a beer, his face was that of a worn sadness gone to joy.

As there is no fighting today, perhaps we shall try living.


	2. Racetrack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dead things, questions, a ride.

The interrogation is a simple thing, pain at a remove, annoyance, disassembly, reset. Somewhere, the migraine is looking for the precise order of operations necessary to reawaken a Kelpie at the local frog pond, and the collapsing ecosystem has reduced the threshold necessary for the tasks.

Fewer frogs, and the cats that hunt the banks slide their faces aside like curtains to check the water, to listen for the huffing, the bubbles, the come-what-will of methane and sediment.

In which sequence must frogs die, then, and when their skins slide, in which order are the patterns laid? Must each utterance and symbol be placed so? Will any position do? And the fallows swell aside, thin face and raked tides rising 24 hands of must and damp leather draped loose over bone.

It's the star in its eye that pauses the question, the faintest blue, and, "Ah, it's you, we're here again."

You'd expect questions to be torture - it's the communally accepted decision, that one is asked, and hurt, and replaced when done - and in the dream there's the dream of dream, the recycle of testing for tolerance. Leaning against that old leather frame, teeth like hands in the shoulder, "Have we begun?"

Later, it's dragging the pond, a submerged but comfortable ride, filtering for where the bodies reside, one each for memory: Tasmanian tiger, the giant fossa, and the whisper of Stellar's sea cows still sweet and quiet in the kelp, feeding urchins likewise almost silent. Pain at a remove.

24 hands deep, and just a breathless more, little flickers down below, and, "Ah, it's you, we're here again."

24 hands and home.  
Cool hair so slick it's solid.  
The company to keep.

* * *

There's a conversation with Dirk Gently's new spawned god, dicky ticker not yet sweeping, one hand to the minute on May 11, 2001 where, with four months left to go, extinction hasn't written this particular pattern yet. Just whetting the stone, cropping a bit of civil liberty, waiting breathless for Together We Stand. Hand painted signs and [redacted, big black letters] Fries, 24 hands high.

Redacted so thick it's solid.

And that conversation goes like this: "Ah, it's you, we're []"

* * *

The background is found noises and the twist of code that makes 'scape of painting, one stroke at a time gone carefully to rhythm and drone, simulations of drowning and sleep deprivation, the pins of the urchins slipping in.

Scraping history away with the edge of a nickel, "Ah, it's you. We're here. Again."

There is no news but reel.


End file.
